New to the board. Just acquired a 2006 Intel Core 2 Duo 1.83 GHz mac mini. I am a lifetime Mac user and am currently using a ~2004 Power Mac in my office, but the lack of upgradability for the pre-Intel macs really limits this 'puter . Hoping to soup-up this Mac mini to use as well. I'll be looking for advice on doing this. First things first, the 80 Gb HD has to go, thinking about a 1.0 TB HDD rather than a SSD. Comments?

Actually the 2004 power mac is not quite dead if you are running leopard you can do some background patches that will still allow access to the internet and even youtube i have 3 powerpc machines myself.

congratulations on the purchase of your mac mini i hope it brings you tons of enjoyment!!!

...First things first, the 80 Gb HD has to go, thinking about a 1.0 TB HDD rather than a SSD. Comments?

Depends on whether your upgrade is for speed or disk space. An SSD will make a much greater difference in boot up time, application startup and document load time than a HDD unless, perhaps, you get one of the hybrid drives. The latter incorporate a small SSD (8gb) and use it for the most common tasks. They are not much more expensive than a standard HDD. Seagate and Toshiba make these hybrid drives._________________Mini 1 (2012): 2.3 ghz Core i7; 10 gb RAM, Corsair 240gb SSD, 500 gb Seagate XT
Mini 2 (2009): 2.26 ghz Core 2 duo, 8 gb RAM, 500 gb Seagate used as HTPC
Also a 13" MacBook Air, 21.5" i5 iMac & 11.6" Acer 1810TZ running Ubuntu, openSUSE & Crunchbang